Thanks, Mom: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-08-08

Yes, this Backup Reminder is late. Sort of like my Mother's Day card. It's getting to be a habit, and not a good one. Part of the problem is that it seems to take me so much longer to write my own e-zine than to write a blog post for a client. Those rarely take more than half an hour, including research. The Backup Reminder rarely takes less than an hour, often not including research.

Not being entirely without filial piety, I phoned my mother yesterday afternoon. She got a computer a few months ago and has been faithfully reading my Backup Blog and discovering all kinds of things she never knew.

Mom had a great suggestion: to re-post earlier editions of the Backup Reminder when I was pressed for time or didn't have a good subject in mind. I've known podcasters to do this: just repeat the first season instead of recording a second season. It works fine for those who didn't start listening until near the end of the first season anyway. And there are only a handful of people who actually read the first year's backup reminders, because it's a small mailing list and I didn't start posting them on the blog until 2005.

There is one small problem, however. Technology changes fast. Recommendations I made in 2003 may be totally irrelevant now. Nevertheless, in looking over some of my earliest posts, I did get something of a sense that the more things change, the more they stay the same. (I usually prefer to say that in French, but I'm not going to attempt the diacritical marks here, and anyway, it is kind of pretentious.)

I thought what I'd do instead was look at some of the older posts and produce updated versions. Today we're going back to April of 2004, to talk about the Iomega REV drive.

So what did I say about the REV drive in 2004?

Iomega, the maker of my venerable 100-MB parallel ZIP drive, is now offering a Removable Hard Disk System (which it calls the REV). The drive (available either as an external USB 2 drive or an internal ATAPI drive for desktop PCs) takes 35 GB removable disks and claims to be 7 times faster than tape backups.

At $350 for the drive and $60/disk, it's not an inexpensive solution, though the drive ships both with Iomega Backup Pro and Norton Ghost. The REV system claims to be more cost-effective than DDS-4 tape backups, but if any of you are currently using, or considering investing in, tape backups, it's news to me. The REV system also suffers from the same problem that Iomega's ZIP and JAZ do: although you can transport a lot of data on one disk, only another REV drive can read it.

My 100 MB ZIP drive died years ago, and everything I used to have on ZIP disks in now on CD, DVD, my network drive, or all of the above. But Iomega has just announced the latest iteration of the REV: a 120 GB removable drive available with either an external or an internal enclosure, with Dantz Retrospect Express (not one of my favorites, last time I looked at it) pre-installed to help you make your backups.

The problem with the new REV drive, as Stephen Withers writes in ITWire, is the same as the problem with the old REV drive, and all of Iomega's proprietary storage solutions. It's expensive for what you get, and there's no obvious advantage over the alternatives. And unlike an ordinary external hard drive, you can't just connect it to any computer: you need a working REV drive to restore the data.

All of which makes it faintly amazing that Iomega continues to produce removable drives. They do also sell network drives and ordinary external hard drives (some of them rather cute), and even a drive designed to work with you Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. I liked my ZIP drive, mind you, but I like USB thumb drives and 2.5" external hard drives a lot better. They're more portable, more compatible, and less expensive.

Technorati Tags: Iomega,REV 120 GB,ZIP drive

I’m Crushed: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-02-08

I thought I knew what I was going to write about for this week's reminder. A few days ago, someone contacted me (through the Podcast Asylum, natch—perhaps I need to make my FileSlinger™ e-mail address easier to find on the Backup Blog) to ask about online backup, which has been the theme of the past couple of weeks.

The specific problem, however, involved an intersection of factors I don't know enough about to explain: Vista x64, Office 2007's .docx format, and Mozy, or rather why Mozy didn't seem to want to back up .docx files from a Vista x64 PC.

I don't use Vista, and don't plan to, at least not for as long as I have this particular machine. The Ur-Guru says that the x64 version isn't bad now that Service Pack 1 is available, but the overall Vista adoption rate is so low that the only pressure to “upgrade” comes from Microsoft. (Even the Ur-Guru only has it installed on one system, and that's only because the software he develops has to work on it.)

As for Office 2007, while the Ur-Guru has been using it happily for some time, none of my clients use it, and I would be creating more problems than I was solving if I switched now. So I don't know much about the new .docx format for Word files which Office 2007 for Windows shares with Office 2008 for Mac, except that it's based on XML. And while I found a number of articles and blog posts talking about the difficulty people with older versions of Office have opening .docx files, I didn't find anything that would explain why uploading them through an online backup service should be a problem.

Likewise, I found some “don't use Mozy” stories from a few dissatisfied customers who had experienced file corruption or other problems, I didn't notice anything specific to Vista. So that was the end of that idea.

This morning, however, while catching up on my C|Net newsletters, I saw an item in Gearlog that I couldn't pass up mentioning: EDR's Hard Drive Crusher, billed as “a new spin on destruction.”

Though this is by no means a data security blog/e-zine (blogzine?), I have mentioned before that if you are giving away a computer or a hard drive, you want it thoroughly erased. There have been special shredders for CDs and DVDs at least since I wrote about destroying outdated backups in 2003. And computer recycling facilities have powerful electromagnets designed for completely wiping the data off any magnetic drive.

The Hard Drive Crusher is not a home-office solution. For one thing, it weighs 85 lbs. For another, it costs $11,500. Even the Ur-Guru doesn't go through enough disks in a year to make it a sensible purchase. But it's the kind of thing your local electronics recycling center or data protection service might want to invest in, and let you use for a small fee if you don't think a magnetic wipe or repeated overwriting of the drive is sufficient.

And it has to be a pile of fun to operate if you're suffering from computer-induced frustration.

Technorati Tags: Hard Drive Crusher,Mozy,Gearlog,Aleratec,Vista x64,docx

Jumping on the Online Backup Bandwagon: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-25-08

Everyone seems to be jumping on the online backup bandwagon these days. Enterprise software giant EMC bought SOHO online backup provider Mozy a while back. Now EMC is flogging Mozy Enterprise for all it's worth. I've received links to no fewer than four white papers about Mozy Enterprise, the first of which boasts a provocative title: “You're Not as Backed Up as You Think.”

EMC is coming late to the online backup game, and has the likes of LiveVault (bought by Iron Mountain in 2005) to contend with for the enterprise market. (Though there's a difference between LiveVault's Continuous Data Protection, which updates files as they change, and Mozy's scheduled backups.)

Most of the new online backup providers seem to be targeting the consumer and home-office market, however. I've written before about Mozy Home, Carbonite, and other online backup providers. Do a search for “free online storage” in Google and you'll be overwhelmed with possibilities. (Tip: read the reviews, and the fine print of the license agreement, before signing up with any of these services.)

The amount of storage space you get for free is usually modest even for a home or home office user, and certainly not suitable for the enterprise. But there are more and more home users producing data that needs backing up, and more of them have high-speed connections, so everyone wants to be in on it.

There's Dell's DataSafe™, now offered free with the purchase of a new Inspiron or XPS notebook. The first two types of files they recommend backing up are photos and music, followed by Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slide shows. 100 GB of storage costs $119.00 per year, which doesn't dent the small-business budget too much. It isn't clear whether it's possible to back up more than one computer to a single DataSafe™ account, but I suspect it's not. (This is also true for Mozy Home.)

If you want to back up your network drive online, you probably need either an enterprise product or a geeky homemade hack to upload the files to a server. My own network drive, to which all three of the computers in my household (my two laptops and my housemate's desktop) back up automatically, backs up to a USB drive. I shudder to think how clogged our cable connection would get if I tried to send 617GB up that 6Mbps connection every week.

But I digress. (Gosh, how unusual.)

Not to be outdone by its rival, HP has also launched an online backup service, HP Upline, complete with glossy website. It even offers multi-user options. Unfortunately for HP, Upline suffered a week of downtime, with security issues for good measure. TechCrunch and its readers had some fairly pungent things to say about that, and one wonders whether the service will survive the bad publicity long enough to establish credibility. I can't see myself signing up for the one-year limited-storage free trial.

Computer Technology Review provides a good overview of what an organization should look for in an online backup service. While not all the same considerations apply to home and home office users, it's still worth reading the article before signing up with a service provider.

Online backup is a good supplement to your other backup methods. Unless you can guarantee that you'll always be able to connect to the Internet in the middle of a data loss crisis, however, I wouldn't rely on it exclusively. Especially if it's free.

Technorati Tags: DataSafe,HP Upline,Mozy Enterprise,LiveVault. Carbonite

More about the Cloud

The Ur-Guru has kindly pitched in with some sources for the use of “the cloud” to mean the Internet. (He had the sense to look in more places than Wikipedia, which has a pretty confusing entry.)

PC Magazine has a dictionary entry defining cloud as a network infrastructure and showing a diagram using a cloud symbol, while Infovark describes the Internet as a cloud of clouds, with a pretty CGI rendering that looks like nothing so much as a star cluster. Certainly it's not a nice, neat, geometric shape.

Just as you always suspected, the Internet is unruly, chaotic, and not particularly linear.

Is Your Data Safer in the Cloud? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-18-08

The other day I attended a presentation by someone who works for Google Sites, the new incarnation of JotSpot. He told a story about how he'd dropped his laptop and had to replace it, but it didn't matter, because the presentation was “in the cloud” and he could get to it from any computer that had an Internet connection.

In this case, “in the cloud” means that it's on servers at Google. More generally, the phrase refers to data stored on hosted applications. I'm not sure where clouds come into it; somehow I think of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and probability clouds, but that's probably me mis-remembering high school math and science. Naturally, if you're sitting at a computer in your home or office and your data lives on a server at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Wordpress.com, Typepad, or somewhere like that, then there's a lot of information moving back and forth whenever you edit those documents, and some of it gets transmitted by satellite through literal clouds.

Anyway, the etymology doesn't matter for the purposes of this backup reminder. What matters is that even the storage and processing capacity of personal computers increases, hosted services proliferate, meaning that more and more people keep quite a bit of data “in the cloud.”

We talked a few Reminders ago about how hard it can be to back up your data if some of it is in Facebook and some on TypePad and some in your Google Reader account and some in your Yahoo! Mail account and so on. But there's also a positive side to not storing data on your own computer. The server rooms at Google, Yahoo!, and your own web hosting company are almost always better designed to resist theft, fire, and hardware failure than what you have at home. Data centers have security guards, sprinkler systems, and Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks locked into air-conditioned cages—much tougher for someone to walk off with than your laptop.

On the other hand, if you get cut off from your Internet connection for some reason, you can't get to any of your data. Back when I was in college, I used the university mainframe for word-processing, e-mail, and chat. (Swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, anyone?) The computer center was full of “dumb terminals:” screens and keyboards designed to let you log into the mainframe, wherever it was, and use the programs it ran. If you wanted your own copy of anything from the mainframe, you had to ask for a tape of it. (I never did, which I sometimes regret, except that I doubt I could ever have gotten the data off it.) If you wanted to print something, you sent a command to the laser printer and then went to the print window to pick it up in an hour or so.

And if the mainframe went down, there would be a few dozen students sitting around in the computer center, and more scattered across the campus, who were unable to do any work at all. (The first thing to do when walking into the computer center was to look at the handwritten status board to see whether it said "Up and Running.")

Some of today's hosted services do let you work offline, and then sync up as soon as they have a connection. But before you decide to keep all your data online, you need to be sure you can get to it when you need to. That almost certainly means having more than one way to get online.

And, of course, you have to be willing to expose that data to the people who work for Google, Yahoo!, and the like. Google probably knows more about us than we know about ourselves already, but that doesn't mean we want to turn everything over to them. (Are they reading your mail? Probably not, but they're sharing a lot of information about your online behavior.)

It can be a sensible precaution to keep very little data on any device that's at frequent risk of being lost, stolen, dropped, or having coffee spilled on it, but that's not the same as putting all of your data online and using your $3000 Vaio as a dumb terminal. If you're going to do that, you might as well get a $300 ASUS Eee instead.

Technorati Tags: Google Sites,cloud computing,Asus Eee,hosted applications

Why It’s Worth Writing About Backup: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-11-08

Yesterday I upgraded several of my blogs/sites to WordPress 2.5. (If you're a WordPress user, I recommend that you do this also. Be sure to back up your blog first—the whole thing, not just the database.)

One thing I noticed in the course of doing this was that I really have very few posts/articles about writing. Indeed, many of the posts that started out on the Author-ized Articles blog were actually about podcasting, and I've moved them over to the Podcast Asylum site. Fifty-odd posts about writing and publishing versus more than 300 on backup is a pretty dramatic ratio. If it's as a writer and not a computer consultant that I want to establish myself, shouldn't the proportions be reversed?

The answer to that would be “absolutely,” but for a few points:

1. There are many e-zines and blogs about different aspects of writing and publishing.
2. Almost no one writes about backup.
3. I didn't actually start writing this Backup Reminder in order to make money.
4. It's useful to demonstrate that I can write about a boring technical subject in an accessible way.

I started reading Podcasting for Profit the other day. One of the first points author Leesa Barnes makes is that you need specific, measurable goals for creating a podcast. Reading that reminded me that this Backup Reminder didn't come about because of any kind of strategic planning on my part. I started without having very clear goals, which makes it kind of difficult to tell whether it's worth continuing. How do you know whether you're successful if you don't know what success looks like?

Though I heard a lot about the value of e-zines for marketing in the first few years (before I had the blog to host the archives), I didn't start the Backup Reminder as a way to market my services. My motive in writing about backup every week was to spare my clients the trauma of data loss. I was still masochistic enough to do tech support work in those days, but I ran into one too many situations where I couldn't save the client's data. It's heartbreaking when that happens. And even when you can get the data back, it's back-breaking labor. Much easier to help people set up their backup systems than to attempt data recovery.

So I suppose one way to define success would be “When all my friends and clients have (and use) working backup systems.” If I achieved that goal, then maybe I could move on to doing something else.

And, indeed, many of my past and present friends and clients do now have backup systems in place, whether or not I was involved in creating them. (I just sent out a message asking them.) But what about future friends and clients? And what about the fact that we all have more types of data to back up, and more options for doing so, than we did five years ago? I still hear tales of woe from people who thought they had backups and people who never knew they needed them.

There's always going to be a need for someone to spread the word, and no one else seems to be volunteering. Sure, there are tons of white papers about enterprise backup, storage, and data protection systems. And there are increasing numbers of products available for the small office/home office computer user, plus at least one site dedicated to reviewing backup products. But nothing quite like this.

Am I really providing a valuable enough public service to make it worth putting in so much time and effort? I usually enjoy it, but there's no question there are other things I could be writing which would bring me greater financial rewards (like a couple of post's for a client's blog, which need to be done today). I'm not arrogant enough to think that writing an e-zine with a small subscriber list and a 20% open rate is going to make the world safe from data loss.

But it might mean fewer tales of heartbreak from the people I know personally. And it does mean that if my readers lose their data, it won't be because they didn't know they were supposed to make backups.

We’re Number 205

I got a message yesterday saying that the Backup Blog ranks #205 on Wikio's list of top business blogs. (That means if you go to their top blog list, you won't see it, because that only shows the first 100.)

Even to rank 205th among business blogs is pretty good when your topic is something as un-sexy as backup, so I figured I'd go ahead and add the code for the Wikio vote button to the blog template. It's always nice to get some recognition. (Of course, they didn't say what the total number of blogs is, so it could be that this one is number 205 out of 206.)

The message explained the Wikio ranking system as follows:

“The position of blogs in their Wikio ranking depends on the number and value of links that other blogs point toward them. The value of these links depends on the ranking of the blog publishing them. So in our algorithm, the value of a link published on a highly ranked blog is more important than a posted link on a blog with a lower ranking. This way, we hope to produce a ranking more representative of blogs' influence.”

That would suggest that there are at least a few influential blogs that link to this site. Blogger doesn't provide a nice list of those the way WordPress does (one reason I'm considering switching platforms), so I'm not sure which ones (apart from TechDispenser and TechTarget, anyway). Personally, I'm happy to get links from anyone who thinks the site is useful.

Technorati Tags: Wikio,TechTarget,TechDispenser

A Backup Battery for the Battery Backup: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-04-08

I've mentioned battery backups—that is, Uninterrupted Power Supplies which provide electricity when PG&E decides to stage a rolling blackout—once or twice in the past. This past week the Ur-Guru had an adventure with his, so I've asked him to write about it.

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One of the things often overlooked when thinking about backups is an uninterruptable power supply (UPS). We back up our data (don't we?) but usually don't have to think about providing backup power to the computer system itself. Because I use a set of two systems to provide both frequent automated backups as well as several key services such as e-mail, web domains, etc., it's essential that these systems do not suddenly lose their power.

Loss of power on a system has the possibility of corrupting data. If a system is actively writing data to disk, a loss of power can not only corrupt the data it was writing but even the entire file system. Bad news if it happens to a “mission critical” system.

To prevent that from happening I had both the (relatively small) systems powered by APC Back-UPS ES battery powered power strips. Heavy and bulky as they are these things are essential in allowing the systems to run on battery power during a black-out or other power/current malfunction while being protected from power surges. The 10 minutes these UPS'es provide the two systems is more than sufficient for the systems to shut down properly and wait for the main current to come back on (at which point they would power themselves back up again).

However, a UPS can break down. More importantly, the batteries in these things do not last. They need replacement every 2-3 years (3-5 if you believe the manufacturer, though I suspect those numbers are not based on 24/7 use).

A few days ago one of the APC Back-UPS devices decided it no longer liked me and started yelling at me through its audible alarm. Adding insult to injury it then decided to start flashing its little lights at me to express its utter dismay of me having completely forgotten to replace the battery that decided it had been worn out. Then in a final attempt at letting me know about its unhappy state it decided to just completely break down on me (a slight tap on the device being enough to turn the power on or off, definitely not an APC Back-UPS feature!).

Two days later the second one decided that the battery needed to be replaced (not even 3 years after initially buying and installing them). Except this UPS decided it wasn't just unhappy but angry at me because instead of just sounding the beeping alarm and flashing the error lights it decided to temporarily, for about 5 seconds, pull the power from the server it was providing with current. Needless to say I'm not amused by devices that misbehave like that and considered it an attempt at intentional sabotage. I consider the act of pulling the current from my server and sending it into a straight reboot without a proper shutdown to be an act of war.

Since I had decided I wanted to start using a different machine as the main server it was a good time to get a completely new, different, and bigger UPS so I ended up ordering the APC SC1500i model (1500VA, 865 Watts), which arrived at my dealer within a few days. At close to 22kg in weight this was not the kind of device you happily carry back home. But after running some tests it is showing that it can power both of the servers for about 30-35 minutes before instructing them to shutdown. I hope this UPS behaves better than the previous two.

I would have expected the APC software, or the units themselves, to inform me when a battery would need to be replaced but alas, that never happened (even though it should), and as a result I was lucky to get away with a scare instead of a corruption on the system. But it's a good idea to not rely on software notifications and just mark down and keep track of approximately when you will need to order a replacement battery. Having one as a backup long before you're going to use it would be a waste since they'd only end up running out of warranty but getting a replacement when needed is no luxury either.

The problem, of course, with automated backups is that they run unattended and always cause disk read/write activity that could suffer horribly when the power is taken off unexpectedly. Another thing, if you're in the US and suffer from what I call “third world cabling” then you may really want to consider a backup for your power. You very likely wouldn't have to get something that you can't reasonably carry but a simple and reliable UPS that will allow your system to shutdown properly might not be a luxury item depending on your area (or in anticipation of the return of Enron). Pulling the power from a system that is writing to disk can often be harmless but it's like playing Russian Roulette with your ongoing file activity because for every dozen times it's harmless there's a decent chance of the next power loss being fatal to your data.

And don't forget about those replacement batteries when it's time!

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Technorati Tags: APC,UPS,battery backup

Backing Up Social Networks, Part 2: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-28-08

Last week I talked about backups for two different Web 2.0 services: del.icio.us and LinkedIn. I chose those two because they're the ones I use the most often.

This week I'm going to start by talking about Flickr, a popular photo-sharing service that doubles as a social network. I don't post photos to Flickr myself, but the Ur-Guru does. (Yes, lots of them are pictures of me. What did you expect?)

I first noticed the existence of Flickr backup tools a couple of years ago. I had a bit of trouble understanding why you would need them. After all, the photos can't get to Flickr unless you first have them on your computer (or a camera connected to the Internet). Surely if they're worth sharing with the world, you're going to save them on your hard drive or a CD, and they'll get backed up with the rest of your data.

On the other hand, if something happened and you needed to re-upload your photos, remembering which ones you'd had there and which tags you'd used to identify each image could get to be a real challenge. That's why there are programs like Flickredit, a Java-based program for editing, tagging, uploading, and backing up your photos and their associated metadata (copyright info, title, description, tags). If you've put hours into creating this metadata for your Flickr photos, I'd recommend checking it out.

Photobucket, another popular photo-sharing site, lets its pro users back up via FTP download. Regular users can order backup CDs or DVDs from the Photobucket Store.

Enough people who belong to multiple social networking sites have expressed a desire to import their profiles without typing everything over again that there's now a Data Portability Project. There's a long list of the benefits of data portability over on the Use Cases page. They look particularly useful for people who use a lot of job-search or social networking sites.

Interestingly, however, while the list mentions transferring, aggregating, and exporting contacts and other data, it doesn't specifically address backup. If your data is that portable, however, it should be possible to port it onto your hard drive and back it up. And, of course, having the same information duplicated across several sites can also act as a backup, though if you delete something by accident, the deletion might propagate across all the sites. Which leads me to wonder whether there's an “Undo Portability Project” in the making. (Repeat after me: synchronization is not backup.)

It will take a while before the Data Portability Project produces useful results, so remember to check out the possibilities for backing up your profile information and other data before you sign up. If you need to keep your profile info in a Word doc in order to keep from having to re-type it, then that's probably what you should do. And if you can get new messages, photos, and the like from your friends as an RSS feed, remember to subscribe to your own feed in order to keep a copy.

In most cases, anything you post on these sites goes up there at your own risk, and it may well become the property of the social networking site once you put it there.

If you're an avid user of MySpace, Facebook, or other social networks, why not share your method for backing up your profile and other data—or your reason for not bothering.

Technorati Tags: social networks,MySpace,Facebook,Flickr,Photobucket,data portability